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House to hold Barr contempt vote over Mueller report next week

The House will vote next week to hold Attorney General William Barr in contempt of Congress for declining to comply with a subpoena for special counsel Robert Mueller’s full report and related evidence.

The resolution will also target former White House counsel Don McGahn, who has defied a Democratic subpoena to appear before Congress.

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The vote, scheduled for June 11, marks a major escalation of tensions between the Trump administration and House Democrats, who have launched a series of investigations into the president’s conduct in office — probes in which the White House has largely refused to cooperate.

The contempt vote offers a way for House Democrats to make an aggressive move against the Trump administration that stops short of impeachment as the number of lawmakers endorsing the beginning of such an inquiry grew on Monday to more than 50.

The civil contempt resolution will allow the House Judiciary Committee to pursue enforcement of its subpoenas in federal court. It will further authorize House committees that have issued subpoenas that are also ignored to seek legal action.

Working in the private sector last year, Barr penned an unsolicited memo to the Justice Department — 19 pages long — arguing that Mueller had no legal basis for investigating Trump for obstructing justice. The letter led to Democratic charges that Trump hand-picked an attorney general who would safely put the task of protecting the president above that of enforcing the nation’s laws.

The Democrats’ distrust with the attorney general reached another peak in April, when it was revealed that Barr’s initial framing of Mueller’s findings had so irritated the special counsel that he wrote to Barr directly to express his agitation.

Mueller last week said he believed Barr had acted in “good faith” in issuing a memo summarizing Mueller’s findings.

The scheduling of contempt votes on Barr and McGahn was just one example on Monday that Democratic patience with the Trump administration is wearing thin.

“Unfortunately, your actions are part of a pattern. The Trump Administration has been engaged in one of the most unprecedented cover-ups since Watergate, extending from the White House to multiple federal agencies and departments of the government and across numerous investigations,” Cummings wrote in letters to Barr and Ross.

A committee spokeswoman told The Hill that the votes are expected next week, but Cummings indicated that he'd be willing to hold off if certain documents are provided to the committee by Thursday.

Next week’s vote will be the second time in seven years that the House has voted to hold an attorney general in contempt.

At the time, the House passed resolutions to hold Holder both in criminal contempt and civil contempt. But the Justice Department quickly dismissed the criminal contempt measure and declined to press prosecution against the attorney general.

A total of 17 House Democrats voted in support of the criminal contempt resolution against Holder, while 21 Democrats joined the GOP’s civil contempt effort.

“Democrats have clearly shown they are going to do whatever it takes to impeach the president, regardless of facts, regardless of the conclusions and outcomes of the Mueller report,” Cheney told The Hill.

“It’s really too bad that that’s how they’re behaving at a time there are some really serious challenges we ought to be facing head on.”